If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Drafting Plans For X12, The X11 Successor

10-16-2011, 08:00 AM

Phoronix: Drafting Plans For X12, The X11 Successor

While it's likely in the next two to three years that the Wayland Display Server will play a pivotal role on the Linux desktop, the X11 Server isn't going away immediately. There's still legacy X applications that must run, uncertainty about what Solaris/BSD will do for their display server due to their graphics driver shortcomings, and other uncharted issues. It's possible that X12, an improved version of the X11 protocol, could even be developed...

Comment

Could someone please explain this "network trancparency" fetish? Why would I wish my "next-generation" X12-based smartphone to be network transparent? How would that be better than VNC et al?

From my POV, the Wayland approach to GPU framebuffer composition appears an order of magnitude more efficient to anything involving composition in system memory over a network socket. Given the choice between full GPU acceleration and network transparency, I'd pick the first every time.

Besides, as GTK3 demonstrated there are ways to render seamlessly over the network at the toolkit level, without involving X.

Comment

Could someone please explain this "network trancparency" fetish? Why would I wish my "next-generation" X12-based smartphone to be network transparent? How would that be better than VNC et al?

From my POV, the Wayland approach to GPU framebuffer composition appears an order of magnitude more efficient to anything involving composition in system memory over a network socket. Given the choice between full GPU acceleration and network transparency, I'd pick the first every time.

Besides, as GTK3 demonstrated there are ways to render seamlessly over the network at the toolkit level, without involving X.

Another idiot who doesn't understand how X11 and network transparency.

There's nothing about network transparency that says you can't share buffers like in Wayland when the client and server are on the same machine. Just like X11 currently uses fast local sockets and shared memory for communication on the local machine, X12 could do the same with buffers. In fact, X11 already uses shared memory to send large amounts of data between the client and server. It's a little clunky, but it could be cleaned up.

Comment

Another idiot who doesn't understand how X11 and network transparency.

There's nothing about network transparency that says you can't share buffers like in Wayland when the client and server are on the same machine. Just like X11 currently uses fast local sockets and shared memory for communication on the local machine, X12 could do the same with buffers. In fact, X11 already uses shared memory to send large amounts of data between the client and server. It's a little clunky, but it could be cleaned up.